From the center of the narrative section towards the end
of the narrative section.
Or through Elanor or the Workman's Circle
where she worked, addressing envelopes,
she made out, went shopping for Campbell's tomato soup,
saved money Louis mailed her.
Later, she found a boyfriend, and he was a doctor.
Dr. Isaac worked for National Maritime Union,
now Italian, bald and pudgy old doll,
who was himself an orphan.
But they kicked him out.
Old cruelties.
Sloppier, sat around on bed or chair,
in corset dreaming to herself, I'm hot, I'm getting fat.
I used to have such a beautiful figure
before I went to the hospital.
You should've seen me in Woodbine.
This in a furnished room around the NMU hall, 1943.
Looking at naked baby pictures in the magazine, baby powder
advertisements, strained lamb carrots
I will think nothing but beautiful thoughts.
Revolving her head around and around on her neck in window
light in summertime, in hypnotized,
in doven-dream recall--
I touch his cheek, I touch his cheek,
he touches my lips with his hand.
I think beautiful thoughts.
The baby has beautiful hands.
Or a no shake of her body, disgust,
some thought of Buchenwald, some insulin
passes through her head, a grimace nerve shudder
involuntary, as I shudder when I piss,
bad chemical in her cortex.
No, don't think of that.
He's a rat.
Naomi.
And when we die, we become an onion, a cabbage, a carrot,
or a squash, a vegetable.
I come downtown from Columbia and agree.
She reads the Bible, thinks beautiful thoughts all day.
Yesterday I saw God.
What did he look like?
Well, in the afternoon I climbed up a ladder.
He has a cheap cabin in the country like Monroe, New York,
the chicken farms in the woods.
He was a lonely old man with a white beard.
I cooked supper for him.
I made him a nice supper-- lentil soup, vegetables,
bread and butter, milk.
He sat down at the table and ate.
He was sad.
I told him, look at all these fightings and killings
down there.
What's the matter?
Why don't you put a stop to it?
I try, he said.
That's all he could do.
He looked tired.
He's a bachelor so long, and he likes lentil soup.
Serving me meanwhile, a plate of cold fish, chopped raw cabbage
dripped with tap water, smelly tomatoes, week-old health food,
grated beets and carrots with leaky juice, warm, more
and more disconsolate food.
I can't eat it for nausea sometimes.
The charity of her hands stinking with Manhattan,
madness, desire to please me, cold, undercooked fish,
pale red near the bone.
Her smells and oft naked in the room,
so I stare ahead or turn a book, ignoring her.
One time I thought she was trying
to make me come lay here, flirting
to herself at the sink, lay back on a huge bed that filled most
of the room, dress up around her hips, big slash of hair,
scars of operations, pancreas, belly wound, abortions,
appendix, stitching of incisions pulling down
in the fat like hideous, thick zippers.
Ragged, long lips between her legs.
What, even the smell of asshole?
I was cold, later revolted a little,
not much, seemed perhaps a good idea to try,
know the monster of the beginning wound that way.
Would she care?
She needs a lover.
Yisborach, v'yistabach, v'yispoar, v'yisroman,
v'yisnaseh, v'yishador, v'yishalleh, v'yishador, sh'meh
kudsho b'rich hu.
And Louis re-establishing himself
in Paterson grimy apartment in Negro district,
living in a dark room, but found himself
a girl he later married, falling in love again,
though sere and shy, hurt with 20 years, mad Naomi's idealism.
Once I came home after a long time in New York.
He's lonely, sitting in the bedroom.
He at desk chair turned round to face me,
weeps, tears in red eyes under his glasses.
That we'd left him, Gene gone strangely into the army,
she out on her own in New York, almost
childish in her furnished room.
So Louis walked downtown to post office
to get mail, taught in high school, stayed at poetry desk,
forlorn, ate grief at Bickford's, all these years are
gone.
Eugene got out of the army, came home changed and lone,
cut off his nose and Jewish operation.
For years, stopped girls on Broadway for cups of coffee
to get laid, went to NYU, serious there to study Law.
And Gene lived with her, ate naked fishcakes, cheap,
while she got crazier.
He got thin or felt helpless, Naomi striking 1920 poses
at the moon, half-naked in the next bed, bit his nails
and studied, was the weird nurse-son.
Next year, he moved to a room near Columbia
for she wanted to live with her children.
Listen to your mother's plea, I beg you.
Louis still sending her checks.
I was in bug house that year eight months.
My own visions unmentioned in this here Lament,
but then went half mad.
Hitler in her room, she saw his mustache in the sink.
Afraid of Dr. Isaac now, suspecting
that he was in on the Newark plot,
went up the Bronx to live near Elanor's rheumatic heart.
And Uncle Max never got up before noon,
though Naomi at 6:00 AM was listening
to the radio for spies, or searching the window cell,
for in the empty lot downstairs, an old man creeps with his bag,
stuffing packages of garbage in his hanging black overcoat.
Max's sister Edie works, 17 years bookkeeper at Gimbels,
lived downstairs in apartment house,
divorced, so Edie took in Naomi on Rochambeau Avenue.
Woodlawn Cemetery across the street, vast dale of graves
where Poe once--
last stop on Bronx subway, lots of communists in that area.
Who enrolled for painting classes
at night in Bronx adult high school,
walked alone under Van Cortlandt elevated line to class,
paint Naomiisms.
Humans sitting on the grass in some Camp No-Worry summers
yore, saints with droopy faces and long, ill-fitting pants
from hospitals.
Brides in front of Lower East Side with short grooms,
lost El trains running over the Babylonian apartment
rooftops in the Bronx.
Sad paintings, but she expressed herself.
Her mandolin gone, all strings broke in her head, she tried.
Towards beauty, or some old life message?
But started kicking Elanor, and Elanor had heart trouble,
came upstairs and asked her about Spydom for hours,
Elanor frazzled.
Max away at office, accounting for cigar stores
till that night.
I am a great woman, a truly beautiful soul,
and because of that, they--
Hitler, grandma, Hearst, the capitalists, Franco, Daily.
News, the 20's Mussolini, the living dead--
want to shut me up.
Buba's the head of the spider network.
Kicking the girls, Edie and Elanor,
woke Edie at midnight to tell her
she was a spy and Elanor a rat.
Edie worked all day and couldn't take it.
She was organizing the union.
And Elanor began dying upstairs in bed.
The relatives call me up, she's getting worse.
I was the only one left, went on the subway with Eugene
to see her, ate stale fish.
My sister whispers in the radio, we must be in the apartment.
His mother tells him what to say.
Liars!
I quit for my two children.
I played the mandolin.
(SINGING) Last night, the nightingale woke me.
Last night when all was still, it sang in the golden moonlight
from on the wintry hill.
She did.
I pushed her against the door and shouted,
don't kick, Elanor!
She stared at me, contempt, die, disbelief.
Her sons are so naive, so dumb.
Elanor is the worst spy.
She's taking orders.
No wires in the room.
I'm yelling at her, last ditch.
Eugene, listening on the bed.
What can he do to escape that fatal mama?
You've been away for a million years already.
Grandma is too old to walk.
We're all alive at once then, even me
and Gene and Naomi in one mythological cousinisque room.
I, in Columbia jacket, she half-undressed, screaming
at each other in the forever.
I, banging against her head, which saw radio,
sticks, Hitlers, the gamut of hallucinations
for real, her own universe.
No road that goes elsewhere to my own.
No America, not even a world.
That you go as all men, as Van Gogh,
as mad Hannah, all the same to their last doom,
thunders, spirits, lightning.
I've seen your grave!
Oh, strange Naomi.
My own cracked grave.
Shema Israel.
I am Svul Avrum, you, in death.
Your last night in the darkness of the Bronx.
I phone called through hospitals to secret police that
came when you and I were alone, shrieking
at Elanor in my ear, who breathed hard in her own bed,
got thin.
Nor will I forget the door knock at your fright
of spies, law advancing on my honor,
eternity entering the room, you running to the bathroom
undressed, hiding in protest from the last heroic fate,
staring at my eyes, betrayed.
The final cops of madness rescuing me
from your foot against the broken heart of Elanor,
your voice at Edie weary of Gimbels
coming home to broken radio, and Louis needing a poor divorce.
He wants to get married soon.
Eugene dreaming, hiding on 125th Street, doing Negroes for money
on crud furniture, defending Black girls.
Protest from the bathroom.
Said you were sane, dressed in a cotton robe,
your shoes then new, your purse and newspaper clippings
know your honesty.
As vainly you made your lips more real with lipstick,
looking in the mirror to see if the insanity was me
or a carful of police.
Or grandma spying at 78, your vision,
her climbing over the walls of the cemetery
with a political kidnaper's bag, or what
you saw on the walls of the Bronx
in pink nightgown at midnight, staring out
the window on the empty lot.
Ah, Rochambeau Avenue, playground of phantoms,
last apartment in the Bronx for spies,
last home for Elanor or Naomi.
Here these communist sisters lost their revolution.
All right.
Put on your clothes, Mrs. Let's go.
We have the wagon downstairs.
You want to come with her to the station?
The ride then, held Naomi's hand and held her head to my breast
until I kissed her and said I did it for the best.
Elanor sick and Max with heart conditions.
Needs--
To me, why did you do this?
Yes, Missus, your son will have to leave you in an hour.
The ambulance came in a few hours, drove off at 4:00
AM to some Bellevue in the night downtown, gone to the hospital
forever.
I saw her led away.
She waved, tears in eyes.
Two years after a trip to Mexico,
bleak in the flat plane near Brentwood,
scrub brush and grass--
scrub brush and grass around the unused RR train
tracks to the crazyhouse, new brick 20-storey building,
lost on the vast lawns of madtown on Long
Island, huge cities of the moon.
Asylum spreads out giant wings above the path
to the minute black hole, the door.
I went in, smelt funny.
The halls again, up elevator, to a glass door on woman's ward
to Naomi.
Two nurses, buxom white, they led her out.
Naomi stared.
And I gasped, she'd had a stroke.
Too thin, shrunk on her bones, age comes to Naomi,
now broken into white hair, loose dress on her skeleton,
face sunk, old, withered, cheek of crone,
one hand stiff, heaviness of forties and menopause
reduced by one heart stroke, lame now, wrinkles,
a scar on her head, lobotomy, ruined, the hand dipping
downwards towards death.
Oh, Russian faced, woman on the grass, your long black hair
is crowned with flowers.
The mandolin is on your knees.
Communist beauty, sit here married
in the summer among daisies, promised happiness at hand.
Holy Mother, now you smile on your love.
Your world is born anew.
Children run naked in the field spotted with dandelions.
They eat in the plum three grove at the end of the meadow
and find a cabin where a white-haired Negro teaches
the mystery of his rain barrel.
Blessed daughter, come to America.
I'd love to hear your voice again,
remembering your mother's music in the song
of the natural front.
Oh, glorious music that bore me from the womb,
gave suck first mystic life and taught me
talk and music from whose pained heads I first
took vision, tortured and beaten in the skull.
What made hallucinations of the damned that drive me out
of my own skull to seek eternity till I find peace
for the, oh poetry, and for all humankind, call on the origin.
Death which is the mother of the universe!
Now wear your nakedness forever, white flowers
in your hair, your marriage sealed
behind the sky, no revolution might destroy that maidenhood.
Oh, beautiful Garbo of my karma, all
photographs from 1920 in Camp Nicht-Gedeiget
here unchanged, with all the teachers from Newark,
nor Elanor begun, nor Max await his specter,
nor Louis retire from this high school.
[APPLAUSE]